‘Twas the night before Christmas…

Well, actually it wasn’t. It was one of the 24 Days of Christmas story books that we read together and turned into a craft.

We’re Parragon book buddies and every month they send us a book to review and tell you about. The November book was this one, although it only arrived a few days ago – just in time to go into the advent calendar.

The Night Before Christmas by Clement.C. Moore is a longer version, I think, of the traditional story (although it’s possible that the other version we have of it is just shorter, I’m not sure!) It makes for a nice bed time story length, however, if you’re not used to chapter books.

One of my favourite things about the book though, is the cover. See those white hills in the top left? That’s all sparkly glitter, adding a real sensory feeling to the book. It’s lovely. Sadly the sensory bit isn’t carried into the story, but the illustration – done by Henry Fisher – is just lovely.  It’s bold and colourful and rich. Really pretty. And we loved Santa in his drawings too – rotund, rosy cheeked and so very jovial looking.

The glossy pages are lovely to look at and touch, and it’s definite a favourite in our Christmas book pile.

One of the things I really like about this story is that the teller – the dad – ‘meets’ Santa. He sees him, and Santa winks at him and he ‘Soon gave me to know I had nothing to dread’. I’ve heard of so many children that are scared of Santa, and I figure if daddy‘s not scared of him, that’s a good start – in a little person’s mind at least.

For our craft I photocopied one of the pages with St Nick on in black and white, and we used the story teller’s physical description to decorate Santa. He says:

“His  eyes – how they twinkled!

His dimples – how merry!

His cheeks were like roses, his nose like a cherry!

His droll little mouth was drawn up like a bow

And the beard of his chin was as white as the snow. “

We used silver and pink stamping ink for the ‘sparkly’ eyes and rosy cheeks, and red glitter for the nose. Finally, we tore up cotton wool for his white fluffy beard, and the girls had great fun glueing and decorating Father Christmas – so much so, I now have two copies of him hanging on the living room wall.

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